Tag Archives: Germany

NODE17 is a week full of art, discourse and learning. It is a platform for exchange among artists, designers and technologists, thinkers, practitioners and curious people of all ages who like to think beyond their daily scope. NODE is a forum, a laboratory to explore, play and perform. Join us in Frankfurt and meet friends, learn things, enjoy performances and get your hands dirty!

NODE17 Designing Hope

Who shapes our hopes today? What are the means and goals that are used to translate our fears and desires into images that incite feelings of hope? What role does the design of technological infrastructures play?

Between collective hopes for a better, peaceful life in the Global Village on the one hand, and feelings of disempowerment in the face of a more complex digitized environment on the other, NODE17: Designing Hope sets out to discuss the responsibility and potential of technology and design practices.

In 2017, documenta 14 will establish a second site—Athens—bringing Kassel and the Greek capital onto equal footing as the two locations of the exhibition. Thus documenta’s undisputed position as host will be abandoned for another role, that of guest, in Athens.

The working schedule envisages documenta 14 to open in Athens in April 2017; it will then be inaugurated two months later in Kassel, on June 10. This will ensure that there will be a month of overlap, with two parts of the exhibition running in parallel. Moreover, though each iteration of the exhibition will be developed as an autonomous project, they will inform each other’s content while not repeating the form, with several distinctive venues in Athens, as in Kassel. Documenta 14 intends to learn from the city of Athens and its citizens, instead of parachuting a prepackaged event from Kassel into one or several picturesque venues. Rather than being merely a sum of two destinations, documenta 14 will unfold in a three-year-long process of learning and producing knowledge, while also engaging in the process of instituting spaces for public life in both locations. In this process, both cities’ communities will become involved, contributing to the project. Already, over the course of 2013 and 2014, several instructive meetings have taken place in Athens with a number of the city’s cultural producers who represented the diversity and contradictions of the Greek context today, beginning an ongoing discussion of collaboration with certain institutions there. In parallel, similar discussions have been led in Kassel.

TheLab presents an evening of co-creating with algae, bacteria and fungi. Come and visit an open space to explore science as a tool for designing with living organisms in the context of fashion.

We will have a 3-hour open program of demos, performances, talks, arts, workshops and drinks.

TheLab sets the stage for extra-cellular messaging. We gather, this night— to glow, grow and multiply. We’ll learn how and why. Biologists, designers, artists, colorists, makers, scientists, weavers, technologists: this is an invitation to become indistinguishable from one another. Blurring occupational lines, boundaries are illusions.

The exhibition project investigates the problematics and possibilities of communicating nonhuman perception through the interface of artistic practice and new technologies. By means of interactive and non-interactive video that use generative and time-based techniques the Australian artist Alinta Krauth considers potential narratives of animals under threat from climate change.

Alinta Krauth’s new project Under-Mine (2017), especially developed for Art Laboratory Berlin, uses video, generative art, data visualisation and an intensive study into the science of animal perception and cognition to propose narrative paths towards a meeting point of the human and nonhuman. Taking into account that each species’ way of sensing the world is unique, and often beyond the ken of human experience, Krauth makes use of a diverse technological toolbox to navigate and translate nonhuman perceptions.

By means of data generated video and sound, hand drawn animation, and digital interactive elements, Krauth creates four ‘narratives’ – bat, wild horse, woodlouse, and rock lizard – that follow a similar plot line: the attempt to survive a species die-off. The artist introduces abstract visual and aural perception as language, interaction with an immersive environment, and a sense-oriented, rather than linear narrative. In her own words she discerns that “one way to tell a narrative of, or for, a nonhuman animal is to consider the senses that are stronger in other species than in humans, for example echolocation, magnetoreception, hygroreception, chemoreception, and possibly proprioception.”

The project makes use of a tradition of interactive and game related electronic art, which connects the human body to storytelling, but proposes using this to explore the possibilities of inter-species empathy. Through interaction the audience wavers between being a character, a creator, and a viewer. While the artist is well aware that narrative is itself a very human construct, and that any attempt to experience animal perception is bound to be inherently anthropocentric, Under-Mine seeks to push at the boundaries between the human and animal, and dislodge us from our usual subject-object relation to the nonhuman.

Founded in 1984, the biennial Videonale strenghtened its position as one of the most important and renowned festivals of video and time-based arts in Germany and Europe. Participants include such trend-setting artists as Dara Birnbaum, Keren Cytter, Lynn Hershman, Christian Jankowski, Marcel Odenbach, Bill Viola and others. To this day Videonale sees itself as a festival of national and international time-based art, both for young emerging artists and for established artists.

In addition, with VIDEONALE.16 (17.2 – 2.4.2017), Videonale is opening itself to related art forms such as video installations, performance and virtual reality.

Science fiction becomes reality: robotics has been finding its way into our lives for a number of years now. Examples range from transport drones and intelligent sensors to the debate around Industry 4.0. In the exhibition »Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine«, the Vitra Design Museum will thoroughly examine the current robotics boom for the first time. The exhibition will present a variety of exhibits, including examples of robots from homes, industry or medicine, but also media installations, computer games and examples from film and literature. It will demonstrate how robotics is changing our lives today – and how design is changing robotics. At the same time, it broadens our view of the ethical and political issues associated with robotics today. The show features more than 150 exhibits including works by Bruce Sterling, Douglas Coupland, Joris Laarman, Carlo Ratti, Dunne & Raby, and Philip Beesley.

Under the title ever elusive transmediale celebrates its 30-year anniversary with an entire month of activities from 2 February to 5 March 2017. The approach taken to the anniversary is contemporary rather than retrospective: ever elusive – thirty years of transmediale aims to use the critical and artistic knowledge gained at the festival over the years to reframe the question of the role of media today. In a world where technology increasingly operates independently of humans, where does the power to act and mediate lie?

ever elusive
On 2 February 2017 the three-day festival program opens at Haus der Kulturen der Welt within the scope of ever elusive. The festival, encompassing a conference and screening program, workshops and performances, takes place from 3 to 5 February 2017.

alien matter
The special exhibition alien matter curated by Inke Arns opens alongside the festival on 2 February 2017 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. It focuses on neo-cybernetic couplings between humans, creatures and technologies, and human and nonhuman forces.

The ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST) is an international forum for the exchange of experience and knowledge among researchers and developers concerned with virtual reality software and technology.

VRST will provide an opportunity for VR researchers to interact, share new results, show live demonstrations of their work, and discuss emerging directions for the field. The event is sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and SIGGRAPH.

THE ARTS+ Runway: Anina, tech-entrepreneur and co-founder of 360Fashion Network, shows how fashion and technology go together. What if fashion designers didn’t need to know how to code to create smart garments and accessories? Attention: takes place at THE ARTS+ Runway.

New synergies between these two branches are more often created. In this session Anina shows how the two, often considered to be too uneven, are set up to design the future and create innovations.

Whether in forms of a Robotic Dress, laser dresses, LED bags and gloves, solar powered bags, 3D printed prosthetics, redesign of robots or maker kits, 360 Fashion Network is a pioneer in the fashiontech market and has many examples and ideas what the future of fashion can look like.